By now the infamous Hockey Stick has been fully discredited. But outside of the skeptics circles this is not very known, or readily accepted for that matter. All of that may change now. A really real scientific paper made it through the peer-review process and will be published in the next issue of the Annals of Applied Statistics.

The authors write that the Hockey Stick is not a necessarily in the data. Rather, the very method used in Mann et al. (1998) guarantees the shape of the Hockey Stick. Additionally, they found that randomly generated pseudo-proxies were in some cases MORE predictive then the actual proxies used to construct the Hockey Stick.

This is of course not new to most of us. Back in October of last year we linked to a post by Lucia’s Blackboard explaining in lay-means term, how to apply statistical methods in such a way that a hockey stick type graph is guaranteed. Even if you use a random number generator.

But the fact that this paper will appear in the official literature, having made it through peer-review, makes it that much harder to deny there’s anything wrong with the poster-child of global warming.